Sunday, August 12, 2007

Turning Back The Warming Clock

Global warming is, to paraphrase Al Gore, the most important issue facing the planet ... in the 1930s.

I'd missed this bit of news this week. My bud Dale at Okie on the Lam referred to it in an email to me yesterday and I registered a, "Huh. I'll have to look into that." Today, Mark Steyn provides the juice:

Something rather odd happened the other day. If you go to NASA's Web site and look at the "U.S. surface air temperature" rankings for the lower 48 states, you might notice that something has changed.

Then again, you might not. They're not issuing any press releases about it. But they have quietly revised their All-Time Hit Parade for U.S. temperatures. The "hottest year on record" is no longer 1998, but 1934. Another alleged swelterer, the year 2001, has now dropped out of the Top 10 altogether, and most of the rest of the 21st century – 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004 – plummeted even lower down the Hot 100. In fact, every supposedly hot year from the Nineties and this decade has had its temperature rating reduced. Four of America's Top 10 hottest years turn out to be from the 1930s, that notorious decade when we all drove around in huge SUVs with the air-conditioning on full-blast. If climate change is, as Al Gore says, the most important issue anyone's ever faced in the history of anything ever, then Franklin Roosevelt didn't have a word to say about it.

And yet we survived.

Thanks to the Okie's post on the subject, there are links to all the details, which basically boil down to this: A computer bug messed up the data, and it took an outsider to bring it to NASA's attention.

The story, of course, is huge. One of the main foundational cornerstones of Warmie Theory just got nuked. Surface temperatures in the United States have cooled since the 1930s, while all the time energy production and CO2 output have soared.

And here I missed the story. Me, a news junkie who scans hundreds of headlines a week at RCP, memeorandum, Breitbart, Yahoo and probably a dozen other sources.

The MSM angle on this story may not be as big a story as the temperature story itself, but it's a big one. Newsweek saw fit to do a massive cover story on how idiotic global warming deniers are in the days before the surface temperature story broke, and that story got a ton of publicity in MSM.

And coverage of the surface temperature story? Okie says it's Fox News only. And Nexis missed that. Nexis searches thousands of English-language news outlets around the world, yet a search of these words within a word of each other -- U.S., surface, air, temperature -- and several variations yielded no news stories at all over the last week.

Also scandalous is how difficult it was for those who suspected a bug to prove there was one. Why should this be so in a scientific debate? Well, says Coyote Blog,

Government scientists using taxpayer money to develop the GISS temperature data base at taxpayer expense refuse to publicly release their temperature adjustment algorithms or software (In much the same way Michael Mann refused to release the details for scrutiny of his methodology behind the hockey stick).

Why should that be? Why, except for the fact that Congress is now run by Dems, should there not be massive ongoing investigations in every Congressional committee that touches on this subject, probing why taxpayer funded data is being jimmied behind curtains, and taxpayer-funded scientists are refusing to talk about the jimmying?

This is how you get a debate to be over. You simply refuse to hold a debate, no matter what.

"Thank you for the "Voice of the Victims films. The students really liked them, and it means so much to them to hear real stories and not watch a cheesy drama like so many other videos."
— High school teacher.